Ukraine’s ‘Day After Tomorrow’: Who Cares, Anyway?

Source: Author’s Facebook page

“We have learned to say ‘after the victory’ with the same ease we once said ‘after the New Year’ or ‘after the elections.’ It has become a convenient temporal shelf, a place to store all that is complex and unwelcome: real reforms, changing the rules of the game, discussions about power and responsibility, and rebuilding the state.”

The war has only legitimized this habit. Now it has an alibi: “Now is not the time.” We live on the horizon of the next air raid alert, thinking only of the next morning — making it until the evening, surviving another strike, closing the collection, pushing for the next purchase, agreeing on another tranche. This is the circulation of life in a country in shock — and there is nothing shameful in that. This is how they survive.

The problem is different: a state that survives but does not plan beyond tomorrow can very easily awaken in someone else’s future. And a society accustomed to living only “until morning” will sooner or later find itself facing a reality someone else has quietly drawn for it.

If we ask honestly: who in Ukraine today thinks professionally about the country not in terms of the budget year, grant cycle, or election calendar, but within a horizon of ten to fifteen years, the answer is disappointingly short.

The government, which should function as the main think tank, operates like a dispatcher on an emergency train: extinguishing crises, patching holes, filling cracks with the phrase “temporarily, for the duration of martial law.” Its “strategies” are either translations from English presentation templates or sets of technically correct formulations, lacking political will.

Political parties, which in a normal state compete with long-term visions, are preoccupied with simpler matters here: surviving until the next elections, not completely falling out with the current government, and staying in the good graces of their sponsors.

“Most think tanks concentrate on practical but narrowly defined issues: tax reforms, sectoral changes, and regulatory risk assessments. They work within existing frameworks, meticulously refining what is already in place. Their ‘strategies’ serve to maintain the current system, rather than to propose ways to transform it.”

The media lives under the dictatorship of the newsfeed: “what happened today,” “what was said yesterday,” “what scandal just broke.” At this pace, there is no room for discussions that do not provide instant clicks, but require half an hour of focused attention.

“The academic community either keeps a safe distance or gets lost in such abstract theorizing that real-life realities — dugouts, border queues, or investigative offices — are completely out of sight.”

It is worth saying directly:

In Ukraine today, there is no institution — neither within the government, parliament, nor universities — whose formal or informal mandate is to “think about Ukraine after the war.”

There are departments of strategic planning, development concepts until 2030, and presentations filled with beautiful diagrams. But these are not workshops for the future; they are workshops in legal self-deception. They adjust “strategies” to already approved political interests and short-term horizons, not to the real challenges of the next decade.

We have a defence headquarters. But there is no headquarters for the future. And this is a threat no less real than missiles.

To understand the scale, consider simple but rarely asked questions:

Who today models, what will happen to the legitimacy of the government in two to three years without national elections? Who calculates the consequences of a country getting used to living under a regime where all key decisions are made behind closed doors without public political competition?

“Who is planning for scenarios in which millions of veterans return to cities without jobs, defined roles, or adequate support — ensuring this does not turn into a Ukrainian version of the post-Afghan syndrome, with all its political and criminal consequences?”

Who is thinking about what will happen when Western fatigue from our war arrives before our physical capacity to fight does? Not in the moralizing tone of “they have no right to get tired,” but in the language of cold, strategic planning: what is being done now to prevent a scenario in which “we are still standing, but the resources are gone”?

Who is projecting how the balance of power within the country will shift when the de facto monopoly on violence becomes blurred among the army, various security agencies, volunteer formations, private security firms, and criminal groups?

Who is honestly mapping out a scenario in which the old political elites return with new slogans and “veteran decor,” while the new elites come with a single program: revenge against everyone who held power during the great war?

A true think tank is not an organization that merely calculates indices and produces brochures. It is an intellectual instrument that anticipates the structure of threats and opportunities on the horizon of the day after tomorrow, offering uncomfortable yet honest solutions that first provoke politicians’ indignation and then compel them to act.

We do not have such an instrument. Some individuals work like isolated “sink tanks”: military experts writing about the doctrine of the future army; economists discussing the war economy as a new norm rather than an exception; lawyers publicly ready to dismantle entire chains of post-Soviet institutions instead of beautifying them; urban planners who see cities not as concrete cemeteries of grants, but as living organisms.

But these are scattered fires. They provide warmth, but no map. They do not see one another, and they are not woven into a single operational framework.

Meanwhile, the future is not sitting on a bench, waiting for us to be ready. It is slowly assembled from today’s decisions — made, postponed, or ignored.

Every “temporary” legal regime, every personnel appointment “until the end of martial law,” every tacit consent to the concentration of power is not merely a reaction to the present. These are the bricks of the state in which we will find ourselves when, pompously, we say: “The war is over.”

It is important to highlight another uncomfortable truth.

A country that does not think about the day after tomorrow ends up living by someone else’s calendar.

“Its future does not resemble its own plan, but takes the form of a series of ‘solution packages’ decided elsewhere without its input: IMF memoranda, backroom deals among major players, and the secret machinations of elites.”
Without our day after tomorrow, we are guaranteed to get:
– the revenge of old practices under new slogans;
– formal democracy without real subjectivity, when there are elections, but decisions are still made outside the public space;
– a veteran protest without political representation, which is easy to marginalize or use as a decoration;
– a power imbalance, when weapons and legitimacy end up in different hands.

This means that we can easily win the war – and lose the peace. Not because we are weak. But because we failed to imagine it in time.

“Hence the need for more than just ‘another initiative’ or ‘another project’ — we need a different mindset. A space where it is not only permissible but necessary to ask not ‘how will we survive until the end of the year,’ but ‘what country will we wake up to in five years — and who will no longer be part of it?’”

I call it “The Day After Tomorrow.” Not as a brand, not as a website or a studio, but as a mode of thinking. As an attitude: every big topic we discuss today – mobilization, courts, security forces, education, media, local government – should be scrolled not only in the format of “what to do now”, but in the format of “what this will trigger the day after victory and in the next decade.”

“The Day After Tomorrow” as a project for me is a public testing laboratory. When we don’t just say “we need a war economy,” but try to live a specific year in such an economy. Not just “we need to reform the courts,” but ask: what kind of justice system can withstand so many crimes and with so many traumatized people? Not just “veterans are the pillar of the state,” but “how to prevent veterans from turning into political mercenaries?”

These could be media formats, open discussions, closed working groups, texts in which we allow ourselves to do what official politics is so afraid of: to think ahead and not tailor conclusions to someone’s situational benefit.

My reasoning is not a claim to a monopoly on such thinking. On the contrary, it is a test — a way to see whether there are enough people in the country who intuitively sense the same thing: that fighting without any idea of the day after tomorrow is a risky choice; that heroism at the front, without intellectual work in the rear, can end in scenarios well known from the histories of other countries.

If you have read this far and still feel a slight anxiety mixed with a quiet motivation, then you are probably one of the people I am writing for. And I ask you: do we have a critical mass of people ready not only to fight for the future, but to assume responsibility for it today?

If the answer is yes, Ukraine still has its day after tomorrow. If not, we will be used — bravely and skilfully — in someone else’s script. As we can see, such scripts have been drafted for us in Moscow and, more recently, in Washington. But the one I am speaking about must be written in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine-Rus.

Also, follow “Pryamyi” on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram.

• Materials published in the “OPINIONS” section reflect the opinion of the author of the publication, who bears full responsibility for the accuracy of the information.
• The editorial staff of prm.ua may not share the opinions expressed in the author’s material.
• The owner of the webpage in the “OPINIONS” section is the author of the publication.